Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

You Don't Need a Big Team to Hit Seven Figures with Jon Weberg

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Season 1 • Episode 290

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Welcome to the Serve No Master Podcast! This podcast is aimed at helping you find ways to create new revenue streams or make money online without dealing with an underpaid or underappreciated job. Our host is best-selling author, Jonathan Green.

Today's guest is Jon Weberg is a seasoned professional who understands the evolving landscape of team dynamics. He firmly believes that teams will continue to shrink in size as technology advances and higher-quality individuals are hired. He emphasizes the potential of hiring one exceptional person who can effectively handle various tasks for an extended period of time. Jon cites the example of Twitter, which experienced viral growth and underwent significant changes under the leadership of Elon Musk. In this transformation, approximately 80% of the employees were removed, showcasing the effectiveness of a leaner team structure. Regardless of personal opinions on Elon Musk or Twitter, Jon highlights the fact that they are still successfully operating.

In this episode Jon Weberg explores the changing dynamics of hiring and retaining employees. Jon shares his insights on the shift away from long-term employee loyalty and the rise of individuals with multiple jobs or entrepreneurial projects. We delve into the impact of spending other people's money vs. our own, the importance of smaller teams in the age of AI, and the value of listening to the right influencers in the business world. 


Notable Quotes

- "My experience is that teams will keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller over the years." - [Jon Weberg]

- "Don't count on future money until it's in your bank, you see the digits." - [Jon Weberg]

-  "Be very careful no matter what you're doing, whether it's your relationships, whether it's your business, whether it's your mindset. Very careful with who you listen to. This is how I advance anything a lot easier because I'm not listening to bullshit." - [Jon Weberg]

-  "It's very rare to meet someone who hasn't changed their job between companies or between anything in the last 10 or 20 years. Like, most people now have been through multiple jobs or multiple projects." - [Jonathan Green]

-    "Not everyone's the right fit for every company, and that's so important. Even if you're an employee, you have to start thinking of your business as your job." - [Jonathan Green]


Connect with Jon Weberg

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Connect with Jonathan Green

Jonathan Green: Hire or not to hire, that is the question on today's special episode with our guest, John Weberg.

Today's episode is brought to you by Builderall. They are my favorite all in one solution for your online business. Everything you need to start your online business from landing pages to emails to selling your first products, all without breaking the bank. Find out how Builderall can help you grow your online business at servedomaster.comforward/builderall.

Announcer: Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and Start living your retirement dreams now, then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast Where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author, Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.

Jonathan Green: It's awesome to have you because we're talking about something where we started talking to thoughts here in the recording, but to me is near and dear to my heart, which is for a long time, the only way to grow your business past about $100,000 to $200,000 was you had to hire. Like, that was the one way to scale, and I'm now in the process of going the opposite direction of going, like, I'm down from 20 employees to 2. The first thing I think is, like, I think I can go down to 1. Like, that's something I've been thinking about this week, and it's not like it's a big expense, but it's also, like, with paying anyone a a whole salary. Every time you recapture salary, that's like something you could direct to your family or direct to an investment, and it's just that really big question of, do we really need to have large teams anymore? Because a lot of companies are hitting 1,000,000 or tens of 1,000,000 dollars with sub teams of less than 10 people. So Yep. I think so much has changed. What's your experience?

Jon Weberg: My experience is that's gonna keep getting teams will keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller over the years. Like, we were talking about, I've heard of one instance where there's a team right now operating a few $100,000,000 of sales, And then we have, like, I believe, subpar less than 20, maybe even less than 10 employees. And I think it's because As we get more technologically advanced and as we also learn to hire much higher quality person, like, you could probably hire One really good person who can handle anything you need for the next however long. If you take a look at I just thought you'd out of the snail. Take a look at what Twitter did as Twitter went viral and all the changes Elon made. They literally, like, removed I think it was, like, 80% of all employees. And whether or not what you think of Elon or whether or not what you think of Twitter, they're still running.

Jonathan Green: So I always think about the startup world as what happens if I have 2 kids. Right? 1 of my kids, I'm like, hey. You're the oldest. Get a job. You gotta pay for your car. The other kid, I just gave him $100,000. I'm like, you'll figure it out. What do you think is gonna happen?

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: It's I think what you think will happen is exactly what happened. I don't think anybody has ever bought a team ping pong table with their own money. Like, you can tell when people are spending other people's money because they buy things like, fair trade coffee. Like, companies like, when it's your own money and you're stropping it, put ends meet, you're like, I gotta look out for me first. Right? And you deploy money in a completely different way as opposed to someone else. You get this mindset that I think comes from government funding. The way government funding works is if they give you a budget of 10,000,000 this year and you spend 9.5, next year, they give you 9.5.

Jon Weberg: Right. So Right.

Jonathan Green: That you have this mindset of, like, I have to spend whatever I have, or I won't have it next year. Like, I'll be you get punished for all You get punished for it. Right.

Jon Weberg:  Right.

Jonathan Green: And that's a bad way to do things, and it encourages a lack of leanness, which is why we see these tech companies a lot of them, right, they downsize, like, thousands of jobs, and no one notices. You realize that, like, almost everyone who works at Google doesn't work on search engines. They all work on, like, their crazy ideas. Right? Like, Google Glass or Google Wave or Google Circle or all these other things that you forget. They're not working on an old idea. They're working on a new idea. They're just working on the expansion phase. So just like we didn't even notice it.

Jonathan Green: Right? Facebook hired what like, ton of people, did a bunch of VR, realized no one wants that.

Jon Weberg: No one wants that.

Jonathan Green: Fired up people. Like, they just have these bad ideas, these huge investments, and use these teams to deploy it, but more and more, the really specialized skills are gonna disappear. Like, you don't really need a video editor anymore because now there's AI software that can take your video, and it's only gonna get better. Right? And edit and edit and better. Get better script writers. Like, the things that anything I would hire someone on Fiverr to do, I can now have my AI do it and not not even expensive AI. More and more things are coming out, and I use MidJourney, and now there's a new free tool that does images with text on it. They can spell.

Right? That's only been out for about 7 or 8 days. So even the tools that replaced, I last deployed, now there's better tools. And so it's getting to a point where I think that it's gonna be a lot of entrepreneurs with 1 or 2 people, which means if you want to be working a small team, you have to do your own thing. You have to actually be an entrepreneur or work for a really large company. And the thing that so many people think, and this happens, is that they measure each other by how many employees they have. This is a danger that can happen. It's happened to me where I go, how many employees you got? What are you spending on employees?

Jon Weberg: And Oh, you only have a few? Well

Jonathan Green: Yeah. Oh, well, what are you? You can't handle it, and you bring in complexity. Like, no matter what you do

Jon Weberg: That's the biggest issue is bringing in, making things way too complex. Real quick example of this. There's a freelancing project because every once in a while, if something catches my eye, I like to do a little freelancing. So website design, I'll do consulting. I'll do I'm really good at email marketing. I give myself the kudos of one of the best of the risk. So I decided to do email marketing for a company called JobWell, and JobWell had a very large budget. Let's say that. So they hired me on, But they already had 1 or 2 email marketers on their team. Strange. Then after about a month or 2 of being with them, Working on their projects. Things are actually going well. Their open rates, their click through rates are increasing, everything else, you name it. Everything's going good. They hire 2 more email marketers. When I was doing the job of all the email marketing already, so we have, what, 5 email marketers Handling, you know, because I think there's a, yeah, a need for complexity.

They as businesses get more corporately, I assume as businesses get more as they get larger and larger, they think they need to solve all these really, really tiny problems, like, Or click through rate is down from last year by 3%. Let's get that up 3%. Let's hire someone who just specializes in click through rates. But your biggest concern is not that. You know, you have much bigger fish to fry if you were to start looking at all these little tiny, tiny, little nitty details in some cases. So They have 5 email marketers when they could have me who's doing the work anyways, 1. And as well, I think, like you're saying is teams that are also gonna decrease, 1, because AI can do the job of what most people can do. Unless you become super competent, which is what you're gonna need to do in the upcoming age of Everything AI is gonna do, which is absolutely insane.

Most people actually, I just realized this as well. Most people who are not in the entrepreneurial world Still don't know what's going on. Like, I talked to my my girlfriend's parents, and they're like, chat g g q p? I'm like, oh, you don't even have comprehension of what's about to happen.

Jonathan Green: Yeah. It's gonna be a purge. I think that within 2 to 3 year, if you say, I don't know who's AI. You're just gonna be fired. I'd actually think the job market's gonna go through a dangerous place because of that. That's why this is a big thing I tell about, like, you gotta learn it now because it's you're in the optional phase. Right? It's kind of like in the seventies when graphing calculators became ubiquitous, people could afford them. They went from $10,000 to, like, $30.

Jonathan Green: If you were an accountant or if you're doing stuff in science and you had a chance to switch from slide rotary graphing calculator for a while, but if after a few years, you're like, yeah, I'm not learning that, and they're like, that's bull butt. You're You're fire.

Jon Weberg: You're null and void. You don't have the skill set required to yeah.

Jonathan Green: Imagine an accountant right now that goes, yeah. I don't do spreadsheets. I do it by hand. Like, I do you know, you'd be like Right. Not you this. It's so it's not like an optional technology. It is in a phase where we're not sure Zach has to integrate with every job, but it lets you do every job faster. So

Jon Weberg: Yes. It's for me, it's the integration of how you know The skill set and knowledge you have to use the AI to do your job better.

Jonathan Green: Even if everyone's a robot, you always need the robot wrangler. You need the person that's oiling the robots and fixing the robots. And, like, I remember they put in the TV to the McDonald's here. Man, those things never work right. Like, there's more people working at McDonald's now because and they make them they may what they make you do is take the order from the machine, you print it out, and then they reenter it by hand into the other machine. And I was like, they have and they have brought an inefficiency into this place that has given the it actually is better for the employees. Right now, they have they they don't there's never a long line in front of them. The long lines in front of the TV, but everything else is the same.

Jonathan Green: Not that I have McDonald's all the time, but I just it's the one place where they bought in the TVs, and I was like, this is doesn't done anything. No worries.

Jon Weberg: Right. Right. No. No. Experts.

Jonathan Green: So it's very interesting to see this kind of phase happening where before, like, 2 or 3 years ago, and everything was about staff and hiring staff. And I remember reading the book traction, which was like, oh, you was all about you've had employees that are through 5, 10, 20 years, and I was like, none of this works with my employees, and I realized that everything in that book is irrelevant. It's the world doesn't exist that way. Even older people job jump. It's very rare to meet someone who hasn't changed their between companies or between Right. Anything last 10 or 20 years. Like, most people now have been through multiple jobs or multiple projects. Even as entrepreneurs.

Right? We don't always do the same thing. Like, you get bored. You'll go, I'll do an email project with this company. I'll take a client myself because of that cash injection, and it it brings me to what I think is very important for entrepreneurs. Orders. There's something I'm thinking about all week is that most entrepreneurs, if you ask them what their problem is, they will say traffic. And I always think about that. I go, well, what if you charged $1,000,000 per client? Would you still have a traffic problem? Well, no. Right? Yeah. If you get 1 client. Right? So it's really perception. Yep. You don't need you don't need a 1000000 people to see. You just need 10 to buy. And it's starting to think in this other way of how big of a size audience do you actually lead in order to monetize how much money do you actually need to make, and what happens. So I knew a company that was doing $2,000,000 a year.

They hired a lot of staff, and they didn't. The 2 owners didn't start making the same amount of money until the company was doing 20,000,000. So they had to make 18,000,000 more dollars to grow with all of that staff, and I've seen a lot of companies do this where they hire especially when they hire all western staff, well, and they're all working at locations you have to spend. Office space is so expensive, and it becomes your biggest expense. And you have then you have to grow to cover that cost. And, of course, then you're allowed to go to the office for 2 years. You still have to pay for biggest landlords are more important than tenants, obviously, but you get caught in these cycles. And I think the most important lesson that I've kind of learned over the last few years is It's easier to save a dollar than it is to make a dollar.

Like, it's not even close. Every time Right. My wife is spending money, I'm like, just so you know, it's not the same level of easiness. Okay.

Jon Weberg: No. It is just much harder to acquire more money, and that's the biggest thing too. Like, you take a look at your perfect analogy of If you made let's just say if you made double what you made per customer now. Most businesses go, well, that's amazing. I can scale so much faster. Well, what if you also had the just a scenario. You had double the open rates of your emails, double the click through rates of your emails. If you had double the conversion rates of your checkout carts, Of your upsells, of your downsells.

 If you know, you start stacking all these different things, you don't need 30 more employees. You need, like, 1 really good person To optimize some of what you already have in place, and that alone could multiple times increase your overall profit, like, ridiculously. You don't need to Go and expand because actually most likely the biggest problem isn't leads or expanding. Most of what you're doing right now is just actually super inefficient or doesn't even technically work right now. You've just barely made it affordable.

Jonathan Green: Yeah. It's very hard to get an employee, get them trained up, and they do something that's worth more than they cost. Right. In my experience, like, I know I have 1 friend who's very good at it. Out of everyone I know in this business, every and everyone on the show, and everyone I talk to, it's very rare. And I get a lot of message from people that wanna be on the show that are experts at helping other companies, like, staff up. And I was like, yeah. But it's like you're not you don't have a large staff.

Like, that's a different thing. It's so easy to be a consultant and tell people new stuff, and I get that, by the way, because there is the value in oh, I can I'm very good at accelerating something. Makes sense, but do when it comes to staffing, I find that most of the time, it's not the right move anymore. A few years ago, it made a lot of sense. It made sense when I was doing some things. But more and more now, the market is shifting towards micro influencers or smaller influencers, which is you can be like, I just got invited to a special Amazon program. Only needed 300 followers on social media. Like, it no longer is it the what people figure out what I've been saying for years is, like, I would rather pay for 10 people with 10,000 followers or 1 person with a $100,000 because I'm got a much better chance.

They're close to their audience. They actually answer the emails. Yeah. They're gonna cost less than 10% of the price, by the way. Right? They talk, like, usually 1% of the price. So that's really where I think the future is, like, the fracturing of the market to where you no longer have these big overarching brands. And most of the time, you have overhead is what kills most businesses. I think this is something that especially people from traditional worlds, like my sister.

I was like, I think this is the fashion world. I was like, listen. You work with me. We can launch a fashion blog. I know exactly what will work. I have a friend who runs a 7 figure fashion blog. Okay. Maybe it's 8 figures now.

Huge, huge company. So I know exactly the person I'll talk to, exactly all the things work shows great. Once I do that, open a brick and mortar store. I was, like, in a brick and mortar store dream world, you make you profit at 3%.

Jon Weberg: Right. Right.

Jonathan Green: Like, my heart stopped. That's I couldn't survive on a 3% profit margin. I when I start a project, if I put $10,000 into a project, I wanna take 30 out. Like, I can't imagine Right. $100,000 and saying, at the end of the year, I'll have $3,000 back.

Jon Weberg: $3,000? Uh-huh. Yeah. People don't realize a lot of how the the physical world profit margins are not Same as online business can be.

Jonathan Green: People complain about, like, oh, Amazon only pays a 4% commission. Like, best of profit. If you start your own business, competing with them, that's the profit you can hope to get. It's like Mhmm. We get so used high numbers that we get lost, and and the part of it is that whenever you hire people, you either hire someone from a foreign country and you have to train them up, or you hire someone from the west and you have to train them down because they go, I I don't know if you ever had this experience. Anytime someone has a degree in social media, they're a moron. Like, that's been my experience a 100% of the time that or they've done social media for a large brand, and the first is they've never done tracking. So if you're doing the only way you get fired if you're doing Twitter for Coke is if you accidentally post something political or racist.

Otherwise, accidentally. Otherwise, you're basically unfireable because they don't track any of that. I was in negotiations with 1 of the big five publishers to publish a new book for me, and he was I was like, well, here's how much money my customers spend per week. Here's how large my mailing list is. He goes, yeah. How many Twitter followers do you have? And I had that moment where you realize that you're negotiating with someone who probably should still be living with his parents. Understanding of how the world works. I was like, oh, you're one of the he's probably the AP with the red Harry Potter and said this is trash.

Right? 8 people read that book, said it was trash, cost their boss $1,000,000,000, and didn't get fired. Right.

Jon Weberg: Which I Really?

Jonathan Green: I have a standard policy. If you lose me more than $1,000,000, you're fired. For the 1,000,000,000? Come on. Like, that's insane, and that's traditional publishing is misses. Their miss rate is, like, I think 9 out of a 100 books they publish are bad, or maybe it's even higher. They have such a high miss rate that

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: It's why would you ever go through as a publisher? They have no odds. And I had all these conversations, and he was like, yeah. Twitter I was like, have you ever met someone who saw a tweet and bought a book? I don't even know anyone to use it, and not to bash on Twitter. I just don't I've never met anyone who actually uses Twitter Right. Unless they're unless they're teaching Twitter.

Jon Weberg: Unless they're Unless they're mainly a Twitter guru or they're Kind of trying to use it to generate leads, but not really Mhmm.

Jonathan Green: I've never met someone who's like, oh, yeah. Twitter's where I talk to all my friends. Same thing about Facebook leads. Any such many platforms, like, to me, we have these really big misperceptions, and it's like, you the problem with people that come from a world where there's no tracking.

There's inefficiencies. Right? Because corporations are running commercials and television firm. Like, they still do ads in the yellow pages because they're, like,

Jon Weberg: so much stuff. Totally. It's because also, for example, like, the track the reason why, like, tracking Google you know, like, Coke doesn't care about tracking also because I believe They're getting growth no matter what. No matter who runs their social media campaign on Twitter, oh, we're up to 10,000 followers. Automatically, you must be doing, But it's because they have such a broad reach anyways, you name it. And then, yeah, it's a completely different world, the small business versus the corporation, the marketing skills. Every person I've talked to, for example, that's, like, gone to school or gone to college for marketing business. Like you're saying, not there at all with anything that's going on in any digital marketing.

So I just work with, I won't say her name, this lady who does hiring, And she brought on someone to work with her. She says, oh, she's just a fresh out of college for 4 years. She'll do amazing. The person who she hired goes, I have no idea what's going on right now. Can you help me with some of this stuff? I go, but you just got out of 4 years of and this is stuff I learned in within probably 6 months of When I was 13 years old when I first got started, so there's a huge difference in the discrepancies.

Jonathan Green: Yeah. You wanna hire someone fresh out of high school, to be honest with you. Like, I would much rather get someone high school that's hungry and knows they don't know, then someone I could just same thing when I went to college. Like, if I had a degree in social media from college, I would have a degree in Myspace. How relevant would that be?

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: And that's the problem. And I taught, you know, I taught at university, and I was teaching on a master's in marketing course. Mhmm. Because they were just at the other teacher quit, and I was like, I don't know. So I brought in people. I was living in London. I go, oh, I'll just bring in all the people I know that are millionaires. So I brought in, like, the number 3 guy at Spotify.

I brought in a guy who was doing $10,000,000 a year in CPA ads. I brought in all these people. I brought another guy who started a comp a shoe company and went to China, found a factory, was doing a couple $1,000,000 a year in shoes. And I was looking at the audience, and they were like, none of this is in the book.

Jon Weberg: I'm like, oh, it's much better than what's in the book.

Jonathan Green: I was like, you guys should really just people who normally get them to speak at an event. It's, like, $50,000. Like, these are unbelievably high quality people that I just have this amazing network, and it was really probably the best opportunity a's people ever have because it's not great college. To be honest with you. I would teach you the best of the best yet, but they completely missed it. And that's because traditional education doesn't really encourage free thinking. It teaches you how to

Jon Weberg: not at all.

Jonathan Green: To be really good in a cubicle, but I think that that era is winding down the idea and the way now we want to work from home, which once people get a taste of that, it's kind of like if a lion eats a helium, you have to kill kill the lion because it will just keep eating humans. And you get these people go. Oh, I worked from home for a little while. Like, yeah, but you did a really bad job. Right? Like, oh, my god.

I was like Right. I'm not wearing pajama pants right now. Like, I you know what I mean? I'm not doing those things that Yeah. To because it's all on me. When you're at home and you get paid whether you perform or not, that's the problem. So

Jon Weberg: People think the when you're an entrepreneur and you work from home, to me, it seems like they think that It's just complete freedom, and, initially, it is the 1000% not. And even as you become very successful, You are busy. You have a lot to work you do. And if you're not working, if you're not making things happen, your business is going nowhere, no money's going to be coming in. So, yeah, it's I get told all the time people have events. My girlfriend has events. Her family has events. My family has events.

Jon Weberg: Like, oh, you you can just come and do whatever, whenever. I'm like, Sometimes I can do that. Not all the time because otherwise, I don't have a business.

Jonathan Green: My dad gave me this piece of advice a few years ago, and he was like, listen. You gotta take a half a day off every week. He goes, you you shouldn't work more than 6 and a half days a week. And I was like, guess I'm a 2nd generation workaholic.

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: I you know where it came from because I was like, I'm never gonna work hard like my dad because he was he worked so hard, and then, of course, I mean, I have a different setup than he did because I get to work home. That's the one advantage I get to work at home, but that's also the disadvantage because, like, sometimes you're working on something that requires you to really think about all the moving parts, and when someone comes in and distracts you, and it's like kicking over your house of cards.

Jon Weberg: Yeah. Everything just goes, I was just in my mode.

Jonathan Green: Yeah.

Jon Weberg: Yep. Yep.

Jonathan Green: And it's there's all the upsides and all downsides. Like, I were everyone's, like exactly. I live on a tropical island, but guess you know what that means? Is that last night, I was shooting videos and appearing on podcasts, and I I finished my last meeting at 5 AM.

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: And I was like, oh, you're in that limbo where you have to meet where you're like, do I go to bed? Because the kids are up an hour. Right? Like, it's that thing, and I didn't go to bed. Like, I just gotta roll around. My wife's not here right now. She's with one of our kids out of town, so I'm like, I'll just do this. Mhmm. And It was like a weird day, and then I started having audio hallucinations. And I tried to take a nap. It didn't work. I was like, this isn't go this is not what I wanted to happen.

Jon Weberg: I should've went to sleep.

Jonathan Green: Well, I just couldn't and then the thing is I had to work again. Right? And I didn't work for a couple hours this morning, but I'm had to make up for my work more this afternoon. But that's When you work for yourself, you get all the reward, but you also get all of the risk. And Right. This is the other thing that I think is very interesting. It's so important as risk management. So sometimes clients will come to me with an all commission project. So, oh, you'll get to ride or die with us.

Jonathan Green: You'll get to do yada yada, and I've worked with enough people that they don't launch it. Oh, totally. You create the product, and then we'll put it out there, but then they never do that. Mhmm. And I'm talking with really big brands. I'm talking that's happening to me with a $1,000,000,000 company. I'm sure they they they

Jon Weberg: do use nothing that you used to go. You know, we're just not gonna move in that direction.

Jonathan Green: They go

Jon Weberg: You just hired me.

Jonathan Green: No. They we were doing a project. They brought me out to where they go. Listen, we our other thing just picked up. We've put about $30,000 into this project. We're just gonna give you all the assets, and you can run it on your own. So they were really cool about it, which is, like, most people aren't that cool about it. They were like, the other thing we're doing is making so much money right now talking to you is actually losing your money.

It's like, we don't have time for the side right now. That's cool. We've added on good terms. Right? It wasn't a really bad thing. But the other things I've worked on, you know, nothing comes of it or there's mission creep, and that's why the most important thing I think an entrepreneur can learn is risk management, which is there's a reason I still take ghostwriting clients. I got a massive cash injection today, which I needed because of a medical emergency, which paid through our reserves. We had a back to back. We have another medical emergency tomorrow, and this has paid for that. That's why I still keep the other things in. The slow money comes. I made a lot of money this week. As you know, when you make money as an affiliate marketer and online, you have to wait 30 or 45 or 60 days to actually get paid so you can see the money. You can spend the money in your head, but you can't touch the money.

Jon Weberg: Yeah. That's an another big thing to learn, I think, for, especially, entrepreneurs and people who are just getting started in business and who are Bringing money in is don't count on my dad always taught me, don't count on future money until it's until it's in your bank, you see the digits. Be very careful with overspending going, oh, I can do this and this and this because especially with, like, projects, they can stop working with you out of nowhere. Businesses I just work with a a client, One of the affiliate marketplaces. I won't name which one. Well, there's a couple major ones, affiliate marketplaces. I built out you don't even wanna know how much I built out. It was a 4, 5 month project.
They used maybe 10% of what I built over 4, 5 months, and I'm like

Jonathan Green: So now we're into something special. Do you build that into your pricing?

Jon Weberg: No, but I should.

Jonathan Green: Okay. So now I'm gonna teach you something. Mhmm. I build because I ghostwrite books. I build into the price if they never publish it. Because That's smart. Deal. So the price has gone up significantly, and my editor at one point was like, doesn't it hurt your feelings when they don't publish it? I go, no. That's, like, 14% of the price.

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: 20% of the price is how annoying the buffer for annoyingness. Something some client really cool. I've been at a client that was my coolest client. And as soon as the book finished, he kind of then and I was like, oh, that's weird, but I'm glad it's finished and I got paid, and then you got, like, uncool. Right? And that can happen. You never know how a client's gonna play out. A lot of clients disappear after the 2nd payment. They never read the rough draft.

That also, I never expect the final payment. That's not built into it. That's a bonus for me. Like, you have to build that search assumption that and this is something I've learned from projects. The assumption of, okay, what happens if it dies in each of these phases? Right? I need to get paid upfront from the 1st payment that if nothing else Yeah. Annoyed. Right? I never wanna be down in a project, and that's a very, very, very critical place to be is that level of control, and a lot of people don't understand that.

They think, oh, once you answer your low assess, you stop taking client work. It's like, no. Some sometimes you need fast cash because a project slows down or an idea stops working. One of my friends was my first mentors was doing, $1,000,000 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars. Every single week. He would do 1 webinar, do a $20,000 do one thing. He didn't need to deal with JVs. He didn't do anything.

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: The only way spends just to, like, hang out. And then one day, his traffic source went out of business. 

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: What do you do? Or your Facebook account shut down or your TikTok shit shut shut down. That's it. Yeah. The I've been through so many TikTok accounts. Like, I just that's how it is. That's the other thing is that you have to know which platforms you're gonna be with for a long time. Like, I'll never lose my Pinterest, but I'm on, like, 6th TikTok.

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: Understanding how the platforms work is very important. And that's the thing is that when you're figuring out scaling now, it's so much of it is automation and knowing when to partner and when to not. Like, I would never do a full on business partner, but I'll partner on a project. Like, I'm partners on Yes. My main offer right now, but I'm not partners on the upsell to it. Right? I'm not partners on the coaching thing. So my partner's like, listen. I have a lifestyle business.

I don't wanna do that part. And I was like, that's good for you. You don't wanna do it, and I wanna make twice as much money. So we have, like, a win for both of us, which I was I didn't think it was gonna happen. Right? And you're in that dick thing, and I'm put things in different positions because you never know which revenue stream's gonna die. Like, the danger of having a Right. Fixes one market shock. That 1 revenue stream is gone. And your online business or your home business, if it's 1 revenue stream, it's absolutely gone. Like, I follow this guy. This I have this new favorite YouTube channel where this guy opens Funko Pops. Yeah. I know. I'm so sorry. Yeah. I YouTube channel where this guy opens Funko Pops.

Jon Weberg: Yeah. I'm so sorry.

Jonathan Green: Yeah. I would never buy one of those. Like, I because we where I live in Asia, we see them all the time. I have no idea which ones are real and fake and how they're valued. And it's a whole thing. It's like, oh, the stickers on the outside. You don't ever open the box. Right? Like, Why would you like, don't touch it.

You just have to use it. If it's in the paper, so you can't see it even better, like, all of that stuff. But key also, duh, and he's doing very well at this, but he also does videos where he opens return mail. Like Oh. Like, and you get you're gonna get some gross stuff in return mail, or, like, it's all returned to Amazon or all returned to Walmart, and you have no idea what you're gonna do. He's also just sneakers. Very, very sophisticated market.
If you don't know Good anchor people are because when I was in Japan, 15 almost 20 years ago. We're walking. My friend goes, wait. Those Jordans on the street stall are undersold are undervalued. I could buy those and sell on eBay and make $20 a week.

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: What? You have to be very it's a very, very sophisticated market compared to anything else because everything matters, and funko pops. This is, of course, very risky. It's like Beanie Babies. There are still a few Beanie Babies that value only because there's just still a few people around.  Just 100 Newsletters left, but it's very interesting to me to see even people that are in that diversify even within the thing, and then someone has to go to YouTube channel. They open a 2nd YouTube channel, and that's because most of the time when you go out of business, it's not your fault. The floor so for example, Funko just fired everyone.

Day. What do you call it when you landfill $40,000,000 worth of dolls? I don't know if there's a special word for it, but they just did that. They emptied

Jon Weberg: The rhyme shirt. Right? Emptied it out.

Jonathan Green: Because they need all these dolls of, like, characters from let's just say they maybe shouldn't have partnered with Disney so much. Like, a lot of shows nobody'd be watching.

Jon Weberg: You're right. Right. The new ones.

Jonathan Green: They do this, and it's well, it's they do all the characters

Jon Weberg: you don't know who they are.

Jonathan Green: Right. So they're no advice.

Jon Weberg: They're doing extras.

Jonathan Green: Yep. It's like, stop doing act don't do a show no one's seeing an extra. Like, certain characters have a name. Right? Or the character doesn't have a last name. That mean usually means they're not. Right. It's like a ducteral that 3 lines, but you that's a mistake, and they had to mulch. Maybe that's a pulper mulch.

I know we do a book Yeah. Turn in the paper again. $40,000,000 worth of the whole warehouse inventory, and then they just fired, I think, 90% of staff for night fire staffs, president's staff. But what's interesting is it hasn't affected. It actually that kind of thing doesn't affect the market because it just increased the rarity of everything.

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: While people still collect these things and now they're because there's I think there's 22,000 of those dolls that exist. 22,000 different variations.

Jon Weberg: Oh, I've and that's yeah. That's crazy. I may or may not have a a couple selective ones.

Jonathan Green: And the thing is that it's a even if you're in a mark if you're in a market like that, you have to be aware enough to know that the floor can drop out so you need

Jon Weberg: At any moment.

Jonathan Green: Open up second revenue streams.

Jon Weberg: That's why I was gonna say thinking of, like, AI and what's happening. Every email marketer, Every person who's responsible for running ads, every person who writes any type of copy or runs any data of any kind. If you're listening to this is a hint of, like, what will happen for The majority of people who are in your space, who are if you're, like, a medium competency or low, you better get good. You better get really good real quick Because the floors are gonna drop out in the next 5 years very quickly.

Jonathan Green: I was talking to one of my friends last night who is is one of those well known copywriters in the world, does 9, 10 figures every single year at his company. And I was like, hey. I wrote a bot that talks like you, and he goes, what?

Jon Weberg: And I go, what? What?

Jonathan Green: Oh, he said, woah. I said, no. I'm not gonna release this. I said I wrote this as a present for you so that you could have something to mess around with. I said, if you copy and paste this in the chat gbt, and he's like and he was reading, and he goes, that's not exactly how I say it, like, one of his phrases, but it only had 1 word off. He was like, it's but it's.

Jon Weberg:  Very close. It's ridiculously close.

Jonathan Green: So and I can do me. Is it if it knows who you are, and the AIs are gonna more and more of that, but you have to adapt. I think that's the biggest lesson is to adapt to the way things are changing. A lot of the lessons in business books are so irrelevant anymore. You know? Very few people even people that big companies. Right. People at Twitch jumped to NVIDIA, then they jumped to Facebook. They could jump in between tech companies.

Even people at the biggest companies aren't sticking around. Very rarely do you see someone stay with the same company. Like, my dad was independent, and then all of his clients merged. They all got bought by 1 company, and they go, why is this guy on the outside? It doesn't make sense Mhmm. Because he was now a 1 client person. So then he was in house, which has a lot of advantages because it offers a lot of security. Mhmm. And it did make sense because all of his clients were now 1.

They'd all merged into 1 company, so that can happen. It was, like, 50. 50 different clients were all now 1 client. So Right. I saw it happen, and he did stay there and took for, like, 20 years. Right? And it was, like, oh, okay. He was on his own for years and with a company for 20 years, and it worked out for him. But I don't think that's gonna I think that's gonna happen less and less.

Jonathan Green: You see people Jumping down

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: because it's so much easier to apply for a job at a competitor and get paid 20% more than ask for a rate.

Jon Weberg: Right. And keep doing that. Keep doing that. Keep doing it. Go, oh, I can get paid 10% more here, 20% more here. We can refund.

Jonathan Green: That's how at 29, I was running, like, a multimillion dollar budget at the 19th best university in America because I just kept jumping between universities where people everyone else forgot their master's fees. So I'm gonna go back to my old job. I'm getting an extra 50¢ an hour, and I was like, why are you here? That's insane to me. So Yeah. Even now, when I think about project or money. I expect to get such a return.

Jonathan Green: Like, when I first started ghostwriting for client books in, in, like, 2016. I was taking out clients because I was in a bad situation. I charged $800 a lot

Jon Weberg: more money. Writing, I've written books. That's a lot not very much money for a lot of work.

Jonathan Green: One of my yeah. One of my books did $1,000,000 in revenue. It became a huge direct response book. They did $1,000,000 with it. I was like, okay. Wait a minute. Sales. Like, you know what? Next one's gonna be 1600.

Jonathan Green: Now I charge

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: $50,000. Why? Because people all and I don't want 50. I want 40. I know I have to ask for a little bit more to get knocked down because and the person feels good. I was like, oh, if you ask for 40, you're gonna get 35 or and the and you'll be happy. Right? So a lot of money for less work, but the real money is constantly going up. And people say to me all the time, how do you find clients? Oh my god. Just keep raising the price.
Because as you have more and more people, that's how good you are, then it's just like you don't have to do anything. The secret to, like I said at the beginning, when people think, is it traffic or is it conversion or traffic or is it your offer? It's like, yeah, you just have to make your offer more expensive so that when you find the right client, it's the right fit, and you can deliver that thing for them. Like, not everyone's the right fit for every company, and that's so important. Even if you're an employee, you have to start thinking of your business as your job. Like, I love you can always tell when someone's been fired because they you c LinkedIn sends you all the updates about their profile getting an update. Oh, so and so headlines. So this is I'm like, oh, someone's got fired. Or so and so sees the writing on the wall, which is usually not that.
And by then, it's too late because you have the stink on you. It's the same thing as when you're in a relationship. Every girl's looking your way, and then you get single. You go, hey. I'm single now. They go, yeah.

Jon Weberg: Yeah. Bro. Right. Right.

Jonathan Green: And that's the same thing. Like, you can actually, if you're unemployed for more than 90 days, you go toxic, which is not your fault. Right? You lose your job. It's downturn in the economy, and everyone with the same job as you. Right? Like, like, who wants to hire someone that says bear stones? Like, didn't you guys just drive your company in the ground, or didn't you guys just get a big SEC violation? Imagine if, like Right. Your rep just says, I just worked at FDX for 10 years.

Jon Weberg: You're like a

Jonathan Green: And you go, I wasn't in on it. You know, it's kinda worse. It's like, oh, you're like a dummy. It's even worse. Right. No way to win, and it's not your fault. And there's tons of people with every company they didn't know on it. Right? But that's the thing is that you have to prepare before the emergency.
You have to have them go back now, not after the fire starts, and that's what most people are doing is they think they still think that we have lifetime jobs. They don't have that in Japan anymore. Japan had that in the sixties They love that culture of

Jon Weberg: lifetime careers, jobs, all that too.

Jonathan Green: It's gone. Japan doesn't have that. Japan hasn't had that since the eighties. The last people that had that were, like, retired in the nineties. It's been gone. So even the place we think has it doesn't have it anymore, but we create this thing where we believe that loyalty is a two way street, and this is a harsh lesson. Here's a big secret to everyone out there. Your boss hates you.
Wherever you work, whatever you're doing, your boss is paying you less than you're worth. Otherwise, your company would go out of business.

Jon Weberg: And in the business world in the business world, there is Very little loyalty as well. Especially in I've seen in our affiliate marketing journey, we've seen loyalty to us back in Four cases. Four cases. It's so rare.

Jonathan Green: You have to yeah. I got this email from someone today that was like, oh, well, we only do reciprocations and this and this. And I go, I don't understand your email because I only do cross promos. I don't know what you mean. I said, here's my normal here's how much I normally make when I generate how many sales I can hear my clicks I can send. I'm not sure what you're asking.

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: Because I was sending I think she thought I was saying, well, you brought my offer, and I don't promote you, which I don't do that very often.

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: But I was that was not the email I sent. I was like, I'm looking to promote your stuff, and it was I was, like, I was so confused, and she goes, oh my gosh. I completely misread what you said. I was, like, yeah, because I'm confused. That way, you're, like, time of reciprocation. I was, like, I thought that's what I emoji around the 1st place, but they're very much there are some people out there that are very cool, and they're you just gotta find it, but you also have to know that it's not always the affiliate. Like, there's some offers out there. People will have you try and gauge growth their stinker that they hope will turn good.
Yeah. And it's like, what am I supposed to do? And you get in these situations where people do all I know in both sides of the market, people do a lot of emotional pressure. It's like, hey. We improved you 2 years ago. You really owe us. And I'm in a situation where I have a huge amount of leverage because I've promoted a lot of people one way, like a lot over the last couple of years because I Right. Right. And I don't go listen.
I mailed you three and a half years ago. You have to mail me back. That's a wrong approach. What I will say is I go, listen. I promoted you in the past. Is there something we're gonna I realized your list is bigger than mine. Can you just mail a sub list? Can we figure something out like that?

Jon Weberg: Right. Right.

Jonathan Green: I'm always trying to find that parody because you never know, and it's also like you never know what people are gonna do. I was working on a really big deal last year where these kids were gonna make probably 10 or $20,000,000 this year, and then they stole all the money way too soon. I was like, guys, you should if you're gonna do this, you should have waited 1 more year. You guys really did your big move at the wrong time. You had your little plot. I was like, you guys are doing it at the wrong time, and you'll see. Right? You should have waited a little bit longer if you're gonna do this, but it is what it is. And that's the thing is that people do that.
I had a guy one time I was working with. He tried to steal a bunch of money from an affiliate, and I was like, they owe you money. You more like, again, I was like, you're so What a mistake. I was like, you stopped returning their messages. We don't owe them money. I was like and, you know, the person that introduced me to that guy, I was like, listen, man. You sent me an introduction with this guy, and that's not cool. And so he was like, I don't know why you're blaming me.
I was like, oh, I just told you I'm blaming you. Like, you brought someone into my life that was unethical.

Jon Weberg: Right. Right.

Jonathan Green: The port the thing that you think when you get an online business, you think that it's all technical and science. It's all handshakes and trust.

Jon Weberg: It's all handshakes behind the doors and mirrors and emotions, and I know him. He knows me. He knows her, and maybe we it's a lot less of, Yeah. Mathematics and define. It's a wild, wild place working with people.

Jonathan Green: There's a guy who wouldn't pay me out. I I forget what his reasoning was. He was like, oh, you didn't earn the prize because of this one little thing. I was like, listen, man. It's $2,000. You think I can do $2,000 worth of PR damage to you. So I called the 2 top JV Networks. I said, don't carry this guy's offer anymore.

Jon Weberg: More than more each should've just paid to the 2,000

Jonathan Green: I wasn't even blackmailing out. It was on the leader. It's not my fault your offer didn't convert. Right? Like, that's your problem. Right. Make sure to make the sales because I'm a consistent person. I know exactly how many sales I should make. I know where I should be on a leaderboard.
Every day I wrote something, I know my numbers well enough. And I was like, and listen. You have to understand that I take things very personally. Mhmm. You have you have to realize that people when people are nice, it doesn't nice is not weakness. Right? Nice is you're waiting for your opportunity to finally do the thing you've always wanted to do to someone, which is devastate their business over $2,000. I was like, just I was like, whatever justification you have right now, I'm gonna tell everyone that you don't pay out. And as you know, that's a reputation kill.
I haven't heard of that guy now from 2 years. He was

Jon Weberg: Yeah. If, Especially in our industry, if you get called out and it's right about something you've done like that, your business is done. You have no no one will work with you. And, again, but for me, I'm very same. I'm a very ethical type of person. Good. If you are screwing people over because let's just say it wasn't you. Let's just say it was someone else. That $2 could have been, like, there. I need that fucking $2.

Jonathan Green: Yeah.

Jon Weberg: So if you screw over people's livelihoods

Jonathan Green: Yeah. It's prom that people get into, and this is really big. 10 years ago as these affiliate. They do 1 launch a year, and then they run out of money until the next year's launch. And so they have, like, this huge dip. So you have to be careful with the cyclical business. Again, that's why you bring in other things so that Yes. You have to.

Happening throughout the year. It's very important to really cultivate your business because you don't know what can happen, and it can even be your employee. We've seen some companies this year make, like, one decision, like, and then their stock tanks 30, 40, 60%.

Jon Weberg: Literally.

Jonathan Green: Like, I saw this safe company that I'd never heard of before, and they were like, yeah. We opened the safe without needing a warrant.

Jon Weberg: I heard about the story.

Jonathan Green: That's it. I was like, oh, you're out of business. Is literally your entire job as a safe company is to keep things safe.

Jon Weberg: It's in your name. Yeah. Safe. Safe.

Jonathan Green: Literally, the entire thing, and the fact that you go well, phone. They had a court order saying you had to open it? No. What? They had a court order about someone else, and they showed it to us, but our name your name wasn't on it. No. But we and it's like, man and they're like and, of course, you know, whatever you're gonna post, the commentary off. And it doesn't matter how you feel about the politics because I don't care about that. I care about the politics of business. And it's so interesting now because we've entered a phase where 1 person who is a social media manager and a always social media managers, and corporate are dummy.

Jon Weberg: They kinda mess stuff up, don't they?

Jonathan Green: They get a visit from the good idea fairy, which you may know of from the military. That's the one who every time an officer has a good idea, the enlisted people have to go do that idea get very nervous. I thought of a new way. What? We don't wanna do a new way. We should do the old way that worked. The old way worked great.

Jon Weberg: So

Jonathan Green: yeah. And it's like, oh, I have an idea because I wanna really change our demographic, which is the hardest thing to do to business. I wanna try this idea because I've never had consequences in my life. And even now, I'll take your company across hundreds of people their job, 1,000,000 and 1,000,000, and I'll still have my job or another company will hire me because I can hop through. I saw it happen with the video game recently. It was so crazy. The video game was so bad, they shuttered the studio.

Jon Weberg: Which game?

Jonathan Green: Charge. Like, oh, I'm just gonna go back to Microsoft. It's like, you ran a $100,000,000 project into the ground, which is, like, so crazy things that you look and do. It's like you should not be you shouldn't get a 2nd chance once over a certain. And it's like, you see these people have an idea. They go, what if we really change it? Because if there's 1 people who play video games like, it's change. What if we Right. Right.
What if we completely change all of the rules or do something new that always ends well. Right? Like, that's one thing people are like, oh, my favorite hobby. Yeah. I really wanted to change things up and see in movies now. And what people are starting to realize is that, like, small creators, as we're talking about for, like, I'm watching smaller YouTube channels because I know they read the comments. Right? Large enough. If you go to a larger scale, I've always been fascinated by men who leave the 500,000th comment on a woman's picture on Instagram. Mathematically, it's impossible for her to read your comment.
Literally. I would have a conversation. She was reading comments 1 per second for the rest of her life. She would never get to your comment. Right. Someone doing that. There's still people leaving reviews of the bible or leaving review of Harry Potter. I wanna be the 1,500,000 review of this.
So people have this intense desire to be heard, but if you follow someone smaller right? Like, I don't have a team of certified coaches. The one thing I gotta wind this down because I know we've been going a long time is that whenever someone's like you I don't wanna learn lessons from someone who's not an entrepreneur. Right? Like, I don't wanna learn how to do something for someone who's done. It's always interesting when someone's like, I'm a certified coach. It's like, yeah, you're a certified employee. Like, you don't know what it's like on the other side of the wall, out in the cold, like a real spy. Like, that's the difference. And so when you're thinking about where to get your advice, you can always tell, like for conversations like this.
I would have given away 50 tells if I was faking it. You would have known so quickly because you always say the thing that's the wrong phrase or there's something weird. You haven't had the friends, and that's what

Jon Weberg: Right.

Jonathan Green: Really get from conversations like this is knowing, okay. I'm talking to someone that actually knows their stuff because it's very easy. There's so much advice out there right now that is so abysmal.

Jon Weberg: That's my least favorite thing in the business world. It is people realize you have to realize that the majority of the the leaders, people with the biggest following except for a very select few. Most of their information isn't always applicable to you, and a lot of it can be absolute trash. Like, Be very careful no matter what you're doing, whether it's your your your relationships, whether it's your business, whether it's your mindset. Very careful with who you listen to information That's been the biggest filtering filtering out shit. As in my biggest, like, okay. This is how I advance anything a lot easier because I'm not listening to bullshit.

Jonathan Green: Recently fan, a new market where, I mentioned it to my business partner. One of my projects is not Bismar, but projects with Martin. She goes, oh, yeah. I've been doing that something in there for a year. I didn't wanna say anything to you. Like, that's how you know it's working. Like, when something's really working Right. You she's like, I don't wanna tell anyone.
And I get it didn't hurt my feelings. I was like, oh, well, now I know. So you're gonna we gotta talk about it a little bit because I found it on my own. That's really when something really works, that's how people treat it. It's like we're working on a project together. We've made tens of 1,000 hours together in the last 2 weeks, and she's like, yeah. I still didn't wanna tell you. Because it's because I don't want you because you know what it is that I tell you and then one thing.
Like, I got nothing with my wife about something the other day, and I was like, listen. This is where the secret ends. It's not the middle of the secret circle. If I tell you something, you don't tell anyone. Right. Right. You That's how that works. You have to be at the top of the thing.
There has to be an end of the secret chain. It's a line, not a circle, and that's the thing is that the really good stuff that works, people. The only reason people will tell it is if it's scalable. Like, I don't mind teaching AI stuff because it's so big that my students can never compete with me. Do where I teach them the best of the best top secret crazy good stuff. Of course not. There's always gonna be something you hold back. Not and it's not even because I want don't want them to know.
It's because I don't want it to get too distributed out there, and also some of the stuff is very technical, and it can be overwhelming. It's a couple of those reasons, but you always have a little bit of the secret sauce Have to. You have something that's proprietary, so just be aware that yeah. So often people will give you like, most people teach what they're not actually doing. It's like, oh, IT fellow to do this, but, you know, your model is selling that course. Like, very people in real estate are in real estate and teach real estate. It's usually one or the other. Right.
Which is fine, but it's all good. So this has been amazing. We're talking a little bit about hiring a lot about other stuff. This guys, again, we had amazing guest, Jon Weber. Tell everyone the best place to find your stuff online. Tell them all about your website because I know people had a really good time today.

Jon Weberg: For sure. So go to thank you, by the way, for having me on. I really do Appreciate it. It's very nice talking with you. I feel like we could quite talk forever. Go to either youtube.comforward/@johnweberg, John Weberg on YouTube or go to profitalize.com if you wanna join the community of entrepreneurs. Other than that, I just wish Everyone listening, absolutely amazing day. I will leave you with 2 quotes, both of my own. I thought these up when I was about 14. They're pretty good. Aspire for progress, hunger for success and strive for greatness, very obvious meaning. The second 1 is your attitude is not defined by your life. Your life is defined by your attitude.

Jonathan Green: I love it. Thank Thank you so much for being here, John Weber. Make sure I put the links in the show notes, and it's been another amazing episode of the Serve No Master podcast. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Making that first dollar online Doesn't have to be daunting. I've got you covered. Get my free guide on how to make your 1st $1,000 online right now at servemaster.comforward/onek.

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